Author Tim O'Brien to Read at Cornell

FOR RELEASE: Oct. 11, 1999

Contact: Franklin Crawford
Office: 607-255-9737
E-Mail: [email protected]
Compuserve: Bill Steele, 72650,565
http://www.news.cornell.edu

ITHACA, N.Y. -- National Book Award winner Tim O'Brien will deliver an inaugural reading for the newly endowed James McConkey Reading Series, Friday, Oct. 22, at 8 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall, on the Cornell University campus. The series, which honors McConkey, Cornell's Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus, is free and open to the public.

"O'Brien is considered one of America's best fiction writers and is the only major American writer with a coherent body of work which addresses the American experience in Vietnam," said Michael Koch, editor of Epoch magazine, who helped organize the event.

Few authors have charted the complexities and moral ambiguities of war and life with more emotional candor and moral scrutiny than O'Brien. Yet O'Brien is much more than a storyteller: He's known as a teacher and philosopher as well as passionate observer whose gripping revelations, occasionally leavened with hard-bitten humor, inform the heart as they work the mind.

"The mere fact of having witnessed violence and death doesn't make a person a teacher," O'Brien said in an interview in the Chicago Review. "Teaching is one thing and telling stories is another. I wanted to use stories to alert readers to the complexity and ambiguity of a set of moral issues -- but without preaching a moral lesson."

A former national affairs reporter for the Washington Post, O'Brien has written eight books of fiction, numerous short stories and is a regular contributor to national magazines. In 1979 he won the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. In 1990, O'Brien stunned critics and admirers alike with The Things They Carried, a masterpiece of interconnected stories that challenge and transcend traditional notions of fictional memoir.

The McConkey Reading Series is sponsored by the Cornell Department of English and Epoch, Cornell's literary journal. For more information on the O'Brien reading, contact Michael Koch at the Epoch office, (607) 255-3385.

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